As mobile broadband users and data service traffic increase rapidly, a rate of a traditional cellular network gradually becomes a bottleneck in mobile broadband development. Mobile broadband transmission features high costs, while a Wireless Local Area Network (Wireless Local Area Network, WLAN) is widely used in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, and other industries thanks to unique charms such as a low price, flexible networking, support for high-speed wireless data access, and an open frequency band. More and more network operators regard the WLAN as a supplement to a 2G/3G mobile network.
Wireless Fidelity (Wireless Fidelity, Wi-Fi) offloading means that mobile operators allow, by cooperating with a third party or constructing a WLAN by themselves, intra-network mobile users to use the WLAN, so as to achieve objectives of offloading data traffic on a mobile network, reducing an operating expense, and mitigating capacity expansion pressure. Currently, a main solution for the operators to construct a Wi-Fi offload network is constructing a public Wi-Fi hotspot by themselves. The solution features a large investment and limited hotspot coverage, and therefore cannot meet an offload requirement of the operators. Most operators have rich fixed broadband user resources. If the Wi-Fi offload network is constructed by using a fixed broadband user network, that is, a solution of hosting a Wi-Fi offload hotspot in a fixed broadband user is adopted, a lot of investments in new network construction can be saved for an operator, and problems such as difficulty in setting up a Wi-Fi hotspot and a failure in achieving large area coverage can be resolved.
In the solution, an operator adds a public Wi-Fi hotspot to a home gateway of a fixed broadband user by reconstructing a home gateway device of the user, and Wi-Fi data of a mobile user is returned to a Wi-Fi offload gateway of the operator over a fixed broadband access network by establishing a Soft-GRE tunnel between the home gateway and the Wi-Fi offload gateway, thereby implementing offloading of mobile user traffic. This may effectively resolve problems of insufficient Wi-Fi hotspot coverage and a large investment in constructing a new bearer network.
However, in the technology, the Wi-Fi offload hotspot is hosted in the home gateway device of the fixed broadband user, and therefore, service traffic needs to be carried by using a broadband connection of the fixed broadband user. This inevitably occupies a bandwidth of the broadband user and affects user experience of a hosting user.